Shoreham Plant Produces Storm of Modern Protest.

[NNadir]

I make no secret of the fact that I was an opponent of the Shoreham nuclear plant, on which billions of dollars were spent, and which never provided power to the grid because of public opposition to it.

The plant was sold to the State of New York for one dollar and then dismantled.

Shoreham is in the news again, because a different energy plant has been proposed there, a liquefied natural gas facility. Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, which fired up opposition to the Shoreham nuclear plant with all sorts of "investigative" reporting, including elaborate scenarios involving the evacuation of Long Island in the advent of a "meltdown," now finds itself decrying "NIMBY" attitudes in an editorial called "No More Chicken Little."

(Note that Shoreham and Wading River are essentially the same place.)

To wit:

The time has come to ask the pivotal questions about Broadwater Energy's contentious proposal to build a liquefied natural gas facility in Long Island Sound: Do we need the gas and is this the best way to supply it?

The answers need to come from Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who has wisely resisted political pressure, based on reckless assumptions, to make a hasty call on its merits. Instead, the governor should move quickly to comprehensively assess the region's natural-gas needs and Broadwater's ability to meet them.

Coming to a conclusion won't be so easy: Opposition to the proposal, often irresponsible, is fierce and likely to get fiercer, and its object would be highly visible - an enormous floating vessel filled with natural gas tethered nine miles from Wading River...

...In the hyperbolic debate engulfing the project so far, its opponents, including many elected officials, are conjuring up sky-is-falling images of dangerous fireballs. In contrast, Broadwater Energy makes debatable claims of a $300-a-year savings for every gas-using household and expects boundless public support.

For those who are unsure, there is scant guidance on how to best evaluate Broadwater - a vacuum Spitzer has an obligation to fill. Perhaps Broadwater is the best way to meet the demand for clean-burning natural gas...

...Unquestionably, the demand for natural gas is growing. The volatility of oil prices is spurring residential and commercial conversion to gas, and the long-overdue repowering of old electric generating plants requires new, steady gas supplies...

...In determining the need for more gas, the governor should take into account a recent finding by the state's Energy Research and Development Authority that vigorous conservation measures can significantly reduce demand. So can New York's commitment to a regional initiative to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions...

http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/opinion/ny-vpuno205060254jan21,0,2659522.story?coll=ny-opinion-print

The bold is fucking mine.

I went to high school on Long Island and I am very surprised to learn that Newsday is unfamiliar with the combustion product of the filthy unacceptably dangerous fossil fuel, natural gas, which is carbon dioxide. Certainly such a discussion was part of my high school curriculum and it is surprising to learn that some other impression has risen in the last four decades. Natural gas is not a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. On the contrary the use of natural gas is a way of increasing climate change emissions, not only if the natural gas is burned, but also when it is leaked, as it inevitably will be, in transfer operations.

If the Shoreham plant had not been stopped by stupid people like me, it would now be in it's third decade of operation, and many millions of tons of carbon dioxide would have been avoided. In fact all of the so called "wastes" would be contained in a volume the size of a swimming pool, and it would be technically feasible to contain them as long as one wished to do so, at least until one needed the materials contained within the fuel. All of that fuel would be sitting on the North Shore of Long Island where it would be doing nothing at all to harm anyone.

The opposition to Shoreham thirty years ago was accompanied by all sorts of representations about the wonders of solar energy, blah, blah, blah but the real alternative was, in fact, just what I say today is the only real alternative to nuclear energy is today, thirty years later, fossil fuels.

There are no wind farms on Long Island providing as much energy as a single natural gas plant, no methane digesters - even though the entire Island is flush with cesspools under every sandy lawn. Long Island does not get the majority of it's electricity or even an appreciable fraction of its electricity from solar cells. It happens that they do collect methane from landfills - and have been doing so from decades but it's not even close to be fucking enough, and so, ironically enough, they're calling for LNG terminals in Shoreham of all places.

A lot of people don't like me. They fucking don't like me raining on their ridiculous happy face parade wishful thinking about how solar, wind, biofuels blah, blah, blah will save us. They spell nuclear in funny ways like NUKULAR and B-A-D and they think they're fucking witty and bright. They forget that I once was on their side, that I bought their line of horse (and pig and cow) shit when most of them were still in diapers.

I fought the Shoreham nuclear plant and this, this is what I gave the next generations of Long Islanders.

Welcome to the real world, Newsday. Welcome to the real world, Long Island. Welcome to the real world, NNadir. Welcome to the real world, planet Earth.

Here's a letter to the editor that sounds like the old anti-nuclear rhetoric, except it is now NIMBY anti-gas rhetoric.

But you made it painfully clear that your editorial writers did not attend the hearings or recognize the real concerns. More than a thousand people showed up at the hearing I attended at the Shoreham-Wading River Middle School. People (including many senior citizens) walked a half mile to get into a woefully inadequate facility for this community hearing. Not one elected public official supported the project (and many attended). And there was a real fear that democracy was not being served by the process!

It is not that Long Islanders do not want to look at energy conservation or alternative energy sources. It is the opposite. We want real choices that fit our community.

http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/letters/

And what are the real choices?

Generating power where the poor people live, maybe in Queens or in New Jersey, just not in my backyard, not on Long Island where people choose to live for the beaches.

:eyes:

In life you often get what you deserve, and that's a real problem.

[nealmhughes]

1. I worked in operations at Shoreham from 1985-91!

I was in the control room when the reactor went critical and did the low power testing until we got the big heave ho and went to work in Omaha after five years on Peconic Bay in Jamesport to go home to!
The greatest sight at Shoreham was to go on top of the turbine building and watch the QE2 sail by and also when they cleaned the travelling screens and we picked thru the lobsters and flounder and blue crabs then boiled them up in the control room kitchen!
Actually, that moron David Wilmot of Suffolk Life had the entire population in a frenzy, when in reality, were there an accidental release of gases, it would have gone straight to New Haven!

[NNadir]

2. Please accept my apologies for that in which I participated back then.

I am sincerely sorry for what I did.

[nealmhughes]

3. Freedom of association and speech, sir.

We never harbored any ill will to any demonstrators, believe it or not!

Mark Green and Wilmot had spun the whole thing so fabulously, that people did not know what to believe, and this was immediately post-Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was a bomb factory masquerading as a power plant, run by synchophantic bureaucrats, not engineers!

[NNadir]

4. Well, an engineer would know the difference between Chernobyl and Shoreham.

In general though, there is still an element of the public that cannot figure even this simple matter.

[Nederland]

5. Bravo

It takes guts to admit that you were wrong--guts that many in the environmental movement lack. I'm too young to claim that I got it right from the beginning, but apparently there are some that did get it right from the beginning. For now however, I hope the the environmentalist movement has the common sense to admit that the potential threat that nuclear power might pose is minuscule compared to the existing threat that fossil fuel power does pose.

[NNadir]

6. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being right when you're young though.

You're right about nuclear energy and have perfectly summed the entire case in one sentence, the last one in the post.

I'm an old guy trying to make up for the mistake I dumped on your generation.

When you're old like me you can say, "I've been right about this subject for decades."

Of course, you should expect that you will also be wrong about some things, but this will not be one of them.